Preparing for FUDCon Blacksburg

by nullr0ute on January 6th, 2012

Well its almost time for FUDCon Blacksburg. In fact this time next week I will have already been in Blacksburg for over a day. I’m really looking forward to the event but I know it’s going to be very busy. So what have I got planned for my time in Blacksburg? The list in fact is pretty small:

Fedora Board Business: We have a open board meeting planned. There will no doubt be a numbner of things to discuss and there’s already a number of things on the list.

Fedora ARM and Secondary Architectures in general. There’s a lot of things to discuss with ARM from koji infrastructure, building rawhide, things we need to do to progress ARM to a Primary Architecture and a lot of other things from technical to procedural and process oriented. There will also be ARM based OLPC XO 1.75s and if the rumours are true possibly even a pre production Raspberry Pi

That looks like a small list but it would be very easy to fill an entire week with those two topics on their own. If I get a spare session here and there I would also like to spend some time attending some of the Cloud SIG sessions as there’s going to be some great stuff happening there too!

I hope ARM will NEVER become a primary architecture, unless someone produces, and we get builders with, ARM CPUs which compare in speed to x86 CPUs (i.e. which take no more than 50% longer than the x86 builders).

It was bad enough to wait for slow PPC builds before it finally got demoted to secondary, and the ARM builders are worse! Please do not hold off all builds on glacially slow builders!

Quad core 1.5 – 2ghz is relatively fast? RAM is a bit of a problem but in the next couple of months there will be devices with 4+Gb RAM.

In the time frame we’re looking at you’ll be able to get a 4U chassis with 4 modules taking a total of 288 nodes each with Quad core 1.5 ghz, 4GB RAM, on board SSD and extremely fast croass connect backplane. I don’t think its going to be a problem. So if need be we could put 1152 1.5ghz processors in rack space that takes less space, and likely less power than one of the x86 blade builder chassis.

GHz alone aren’t necessarily a good performance indicator. How fast is a 2 GHz ARM compared to, say, a 2 or 3 GHz Core i7? (Instructions per cycle matter, and don’t forget that a RISC architecture like ARM requires more instructions to do the same thing. So I think only benchmarks could really tell.)

And 1152 processors sounds impressive, but keep in mind that not everything is parallelizable.